Genres And Aesthetics In An Aging World

Yesterday in my Media Studies: Ideas class, we were talking about expression and composition in art as part of our continuing study of aesthetics. We got to this point where we were talking about genres and artistic conventions, and people asked if we humans are “lazy” because we have the same simple genres (romances, comedies) as we’ve ever had – was that the best we could do? The conversation was moving really fast and I never got a chance to talk at that point. There was something I had read that I couldn’t recall, and our professor kept trying to rein us back in before we got ahead of ourselves. But we missed a few things:

Yes, there are conventions, but they are continuously growing and expanding. We talked briefly about outsider and “anti” art, about which Adorno says “even the abolition of art is respectful of art because it takes the truth claim of art seriously.” It would seem the role of such artists on the fringe is to challenge conventions, as well as create new ones.

We’re really short sighted if we think “there’s nothing new under the sun” in the terms of genre and artistic form. Sure, tragedy has been around since the Greeks, but what about science fiction? Sure, there was proto-science fiction centuries ago, but as a literary genre it really came out in the 19th century and is still trying to find it’s stride. I think we had a high moment as it emerged from pulp with the work of writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K Dick, Bradbury and Vonnegut, and other authors who are only barely defined by the “science fiction” label. In these cases the genre is a vehicle for stories which are otherwise unacceptable to the society (like how 1969’s horror Night of the Living Dead was able to speak about domestic racism and cast a black man as the hero and the main protagonist). Even now there are mutations of science fiction which challenge the idea of strict classification. Midnight In Paris is a weird fantasy/romance/drama. Which leads to my next point:

Genres are disingenuous restrictions on any work of art. What I couldn’t remember in class was something I read in Narrative In Media, an excellent overview of narrative theory and its application to mass media.

In the relationship between genre and ideology it can be argued that genres adapt to hegemonic changes – the way a dominant ideology secures consent to its world view, but has to keep on securing it in the face of oppositional forces… At the level of ideology it is interpreted as helping to create a new consensus or dominant ideology. In this way, genres act to articulate, in a very powerful way, what Roland Barthes calls the ‘myths’ of society. P. 138

Although hybrids of genres are out there, they are still create this idea of hegemony through these myths. What are the myths of society?

Media myths are, by and large, the myths of late capitalism in Western societies, which function to produce the coherent subjects of capitalist economies. As subjects, we are prepared to keep working to maintain the status quo of power as long as we have access to the media products and consumer items that construct and reinforce our identities. P. 7

So it’s not that we’re lazy, it’s that we’ve stopped being able to imagine alternatives. Slavoj Žižek articulated this very well just some time ago.

In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

Why are we still watching the same kinds of movies, reading the same kinds of books, listening to the same music, which ordinarily must fit in some box labeled comedy/drama/romance/rock/jazz/hip-hop or some thing of that sort? Because we cannot dream anything but this “American dream.” Dreams supposed to be intensely private affairs. But more and more often, we are dreaming about the incredible way things are, rather than how they could be. When we dream about lives as they are (wake up, get dressed, get out the door, then wake up again) we never feel as though we’ve slept well. But worse than that, we’ve lost the ability to imagine life differently then how it is.

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2 thoughts on “Genres And Aesthetics In An Aging World”

I liked the quote from Slavoj Žižek, it reminded me a lot of Marx’s idea of religion as the “opium of the people”. Only instead of religion nowadays it’s mass media that influences the ideologies of the people.